Cryoablation
by WC Pemm
Summary: Protect the fire with your hands, if you must. But don't be surprised when the blisters form, or when you cease to feel the pain. [Sequel to Sparkler.]
1. Fatigue

**cry__****·**o·ab·la·tion, n. _(kri″o-ab-la´shun)_ —  
the removal of tissue by destroying it with extreme cold.

* * *

**01. fa·tigue ****_|fəˈtēg|_**

1. extreme tiredness, typically resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness.  
2. weakness in materials, esp. metal, caused by repeated variations of stress.

* * *

The only warning they got as they barreled into RED territory was the faintest whiff of rubber and sulfur, and something red hanging in the corners. The moment the smell curled up to his brain the Engineer threw himself back out the door and into the snow, raising his toolbox like a shield. The Pyro, blinkered by lenses and nose dead to anything but smoke and asbestos, had no such luck.

There was a blinding flash of light as the stickybombs went off, and the Engineer heard a muffled scream and a thump. He cussed, scuttled back behind the chain-link fence that formed a short corridor outside the RED base, and threw down his toolbox. By the time the RED demolitions expert came trotting out to look for him, there was a sentry waiting.

Hunkered down behind his machine, the BLU engineer—one Dell Conagher, forty-three years old and without so much as a gray hair to show for it—watched as the demoman backpedaled. The sentry tracked his movements, beeping in alarm and spitting bullets, but it only ran a spray of holes up the wall as it chased him back into the building.

Dell bit his lip, rubbing his gloved hands together. His breath was coming out in silvery puffs of fog, and just pulling his sentry up had taken him a full three seconds longer than usual. This new station had them parked in the middle of Alaska somewhere, or maybe even Canada, he wasn't sure. Either way, it was cold, cold, cold, and that wasn't something his machines were built for. Neither was he.

In the distance, he could hear the shouting and screaming that came standard with any day on his job. The rest of the BLU mercenaries had stayed behind to hold the middle territory they'd only just taken. It had been the Pyro's idea for them to go ahead and try to push the RED team back further.

(Alright, no. What the Pyro had really done was manage to find a damn butterfly in the snow. An honest-to-God butterfly. She had chased it along its path toward the RED base, and Dell tailed her. It wouldn't have set right with him not to.)

So now he was alone, his nearest teammate probably caught up in the jaws of the respawn system. Dell rubbed at his arms through the thin fabric of his coat and looked around. Would he have a better chance if he pulled out his shotgun now, or should he distill its ammo down into the sentry?

The decision was made for him when the sentry spun around entirely, beeping up a riot. Dell scrambled out of its line of fire half a second before it started shooting. Behind him, and he must have come out of the other doorway to the left of the place the RED demoman was edging around a corner. The nose of that all-too-familiar grenade launcher stuck out at an angle just right to roll its payload into his flimsy shelter.

Dell cussed and fumbled for his shotgun, fingers numb and stupid. He scrambled backwards, behind the sentry, and covered his head.

Shrapnel ripped into him as the sentry went to pieces. He tasted blood. Pressed against the cement blocks of the RED base, he tried to remember if he'd reloaded the shotgun after emptying it on the enemy spy just before the Pyro had taken off. He didn't have time to check: the demoman rounded the corner, wielding a golf club that shone hard and cold in the winter sunlight.

The RED raised the nine-iron with a vicious grin. Dell grimaced. He had just put the butt of his shotgun to his shoulder when a dark shape materialized from where the demoman had come. The demoman stepped forward. The shape lifted its arms and swung down the sledgehammer in its hands.

Dell had always heard about desensitization to violence, and had found it by and large to be true. Ten years in the oil fields had done that well enough to start, and working for the Builder's League United had only cemented it, ensuring they all saw dozens of sickening deaths every day. Once his own sentry's rockets had misfired on impact and he was rewarded with a blowback of gore—another time he'd had the singularly horrifying experience of having his own wrench crammed down his throat, the last thing he could remember before his memory went dark. And in spite of all of that, he still winced when the demoman's head caved in.

The RED dropped instantly, and the Pyro slammed the sledgehammer into him again before relaxing her grip on it. She tilted her head to one side, staring down at him, then nudged him with the toe of her boot. She made a disappointed sort of sound when he didn't move, slinging the weapon back into her belt.

Dell let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He popped open the shotgun's barrel and looked inside: empty. The Pyro had just saved his life.

In the next moment he had dropped the gun into the snow. The Pyro had rushed him, catching him up in a bloodsplattered hug, and then she was off again. Dell shook himself and tried to flick off some of the brain she'd gotten on his overalls before crouching to pick up the shotgun. "Thanks, Smoky."

She made some vague noise in response, too busy investigating the remains of the sentry to pay attention. Dell chose to take it as a positive sign and made his way over to her.

She didn't look much worse for the wear despite catching the brunt of the blast. There was a tear on the back of her chemsuit, and a dangerous-looking dent in her oxygen tank, neither of which he had the means to do anything about out here. Instead he knelt and started picking through the scrap of his sentry for salvagable parts. The Pyro looked over her shoulder toward the RED base, having lost interest. "Hhrs HHD?" _Where's RED?_

"Plannin' their counterattack, I reckon. Dunno what the demo was thinkin'. C'mon, let's get while the gettin's good."

She squared her shoulders and stomped her foot, glaring at him. At least he figured it was a glare. Time was that'd bring him kind of a smile, a hope, seeing some of her old attitude crop up. Right now—with the cold and his broken sentry and with no sign of backup on the way—it was just irritating.

"You wanna go get yourself killed, be my guest," he snapped, stuffing the metal parts into his now-dented toolbox. One sliced his hand clean through the glove, and his temper flared. He cussed, ripped off the glove, and stuck the bleeding edge of his palm in his mouth for a few seconds. "Don't know why I followed you in the first place," he said when he pulled his hand out again. "I'm sure their pyro ain't got enough to do without you lightin' his team on fire. Or, or go—go give their sniper some damn target practice, he needs it." His voice had gotten loud enough it surprised even him. "I don't know why I even bother talkin' t'ya like you're a person anymore. You ain't got a clue what I'm sayin', do you?"

As he slammed the toolbox shut and turned to head back for the middle control point, he made the mistake of looking at her. She stood there with her hands curled in front of her, picking at the rubber of her gloves. Slack-shouldered, knees touching, head to one side—she looked like a bewildered child.

"Hhenhgneer?" she said, soft, as he stormed past. "Hhenghy?"

He was too angry to take it back, even though he knew he wouldn't get to apologize. By the time he'd have cooled off, she would have already forgotten.

* * *

The mess quieted a little when Dell walked in, ten minutes late for dinner, but it bounced back almost at once as he fetched food and a beer. When he took his place by the Pyro she ignored him, too busy building a teepee out of stolen forks. "So," he said, popping the lid off his bottle with the table's edge and looking around at his teammates, "no progress."

"Almost had it this morning," Scout said around a mouthful of corn. "Heck, I did have it, I was like twenty seconds off gettin' fourth once, backcap y'know, then the freakin' medic pops his stupid head out up on the stairs with his dumb crossbow. The medic!" He slammed his fist on the table. The Pyro's fork teepee teetered dangerously. "I dunno how he even got me with the stupid thing, can you freakin' believe that crap?"

"Sure can," Sniper said, smirking into his coffee. "You were standin' there makin' faces at the man, you were." Scout just rolled his eyes and shoved more food into his mouth. "S'alright, I got him after."

"Whebn'd you sho'up?"

"Just a bit before he got you in the eye."

Scout winced, screwing up his face at the thought. He swallowed. "Ugh, not while I'm freakin' eatin', alright, gimme a break, don't think I needed to know that. I _like_ my respawn amnesia."

"Still," Dell continued, "no progress. Holding middle—barely—but we've been holding it for a month now. Month and a week, even." He glanced around at his teammates. "And y'all look as tired as I am. We got to get us a new strategy."

"Hey I didn't see you helpin' us none, where was you?" Scout pointed his fork at Dell, one eyebrow raised. "Coulda used that damn sentry when their heavy came down off the cliff, yeah?"

"CORRECT!" bellowed Soldier, slamming both palms flat on the table and leaning forward. The team collectively flinched. The coffee in Sniper's mug leapt, and the Pyro's teepee clattered apart, forks skidding to the floor. She made a distressed noise and dove down after them, leaving Dell on his own. "Where were you, soldier?" Soldier demanded, his helmet having leapt up enough for him to glare at Dell from under it. "Cowering in respawn? Fraternizing with the enemy?! _Deserting the line of duty?!_ UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR—"

Heavy reached across the table and slid the helmet down over Soldier's eyes. Soldier kept yelling, but it was drowned out by the gunman's bass rumble. "Engineer and Pyro, I have seen them advancing toward the RED base."

He glanced over at Dell, who had pushed up his goggles to rub at one eye. A headache was creeping in at the edge of his senses. "Passed you on the way back, yeah. Me an' Pyro went ahead, thought we'd see what their reinforcements were lookin' like." Heavy nodded, slow and ponderous, and lightly pushed Soldier back toward his seat. He fell into it with a thump, the helmet's straps flying. "Had a run-in with their demoman, but Pyro took care of it."

As if on cue, the Pyro clambered back up into her seat, hands full of silverware. She looked around at the table for a moment, at the rest of the team watching her, before raising one fist. "Hhhdhrh!"

"Aye, good on ye, laddie. Sorry boot-lickin' farce o' a demolitions man, him," Demo said with a grin. The Pyro nodded, and Dell felt his mood sour as he looked at her. He'd bet money she didn't have any idea what had just been said. It was a wonder she got by as well as she did, given she could barely string three words together anymore.

It got old, was all, when he was the one had to put up with her all the time. She never wanted to be around anyone else, or at least that was how it felt. When she tried to take his fork straight out of his hand to add to her project a few minutes later, he scarcely kept himself from snapping at her.

But he did, and the rest of dinner passed without incident, if Dell didn't include Scout threatening to jam his bat down Spy's throat for some lewd suggestions about his mother and the RED spy. (He didn't. That happened on a daily basis.) As kitchen duty fell to Medic and Soldier for the night, Dell was able to slip away, down the aptly-named Coldfront base's dim hallways. It was a far cry from Teufort, or even Dustbowl or Harvest—the whole complex was frigid, poorly maintained, and dark.

The space he'd claimed for himself and his machines was well on the other end of the base from everything else, and he liked it that way. It was quieter. Of course, that made the electric hum the room's lights gave off even louder, just loud enough that it was difficult to tune them out. After a month and a half of it he'd gotten used to them as a kind of white noise, but in the late, empty hours he preferred to work in it was jarring at best. They buzzed to life when he flipped the switch, and he managed not to flinch this time, and made his way to his workbench.

A mess of gears and wires and metal greeted him. Dell stared for a second or two before shoving most of it off to one side, suddenly unmotivated. The idea of trying—again—to cold-proof his teleporters wasn't appealing, and neither was the thought of field-testing them in the snow for the _n_th time. He flicked a stray wingnut off the scratched wood and cast his gaze around the room.

It was big, at least. Compared to the workshops he had at most of the other bases it was downright spacious. A sturdy wooden workbench stood beneath huge windows that faced southeast and flooded the room with light during the day, and a smaller one on the opposite wall made for a fine place to stow anything he might need it to.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, the door locked.

He glanced back at the workbench, then knelt down to look at the shelves beneath it. It took only a moment to find what he sought. He dragged the cardboard box out from under the bench and hefted it onto the top. It tipped over the second he let go of it, the cardboard warped and weak, and out spilled scrap metal that was by now so familiar he could almost tell the pieces apart by touch. For a long ten seconds he just looked at it, then plucked out a jag of metal between his gloved fingers. It gleamed in the humming lights as he turned it over in his hand. Then he dropped it, and with a harsh sigh he started sweeping all of it back into the box labeled _Pyro's Dispenser_.

Bad habit, this was—pulling the damn thing out whenever he couldn't find anything else to do. It was unhealthy. He was shoving the last piece of blue casing into the box when there came a knock at the door. Dell ignored it, and it came again, more insistent. A muffled, "Yo, hardhat!" followed.

His teeth grit. Steeling himself for whatever inane thing Scout had to tell him now, he stowed the box back under the workbench and went to answer it. In four years the boy had scarcely matured a whit. Hadn't hardly grown any, either. Twenty-two and twenty-six wasn't such a big gap in the first place, but respawn had kept him looking almost the same as the day Dell had met him. Not that such couldn't be said for them all; just on Scout it was most obvious.

Scout was tapping his foot when Dell opened the door. "Hey," he started before it was even open all the way, "Engie, yo, c'mon what gives?"

"What?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "Said you'd help me figger out what's the deal with my gun, said you'd meet me afta' dinner out in the firin' range this mornin', what, you forget?"

"…I did say that, didn't I." Dell exhaled, felt the growing pounding in his temples grow harsher. "I did forget. Sorry, Scout. Alright. G'wan, get, I'll be there in a minute."

Scout grinned and touched the bill of his hat before speeding off. Dell hung in the doorway a moment, watching.

* * *

The scattergun felt too cold in his hands. It was dinged and scuffed, too, like everything else Scout owned. Being the youngest of eight sons probably didn't make one familiar with owning anything worth keeping nice.

Dell turned it over, then reached up to move his goggles from his eyes. Hesitation—"You did unload this thing, right?"

"What, 'course I did, you think I'm stupid?" Scout said, even as Dell popped the weapon open to check. He gave Dell a smug look when it proved empty. Dell ignored him and lifted his goggles up to his forehead. "See, right like that, sheesh. Wouldn't even matter, what, so you blow off a couple fingers, you gotta respawn yourself—"

"Which I'd just as soon avoid. So you tellin' me this thing's misfiring?"

His voice echoed in the old barn they had come to call the firing range. It stood some ways out from the base, far enough that its distance from the barracks made it ideal for muffling gunfire. Frozen bales of forgotten, moldy hay were perfect for target practice. Dell had hoped to avoid the damn place for a while longer than this, though; his sentries had seemed to finally quit gumming up in the cold with his latest adjustments. He was sick of testing them out here.

Scout nodded. Well. He nodded, and leaned forward, and started gesticulating wildly as he explained. "Cuz I mean it's weird, like, it ain't ever been a thing before, broke weapons an' like that, cuz respawn always fixes it somehow? Maybe it's the cold? But yeah like two days ago damn thing just quit on me, middle of the point, I was lucky I got outta there cuz their pyro was comin' at me, shootin' those stupid flares, got me in the friggin' leg the little shit, hey, yeah, you was there, I went 'round the corner there and it was you an' your stuff." He stopped for breath, approximately a tenth of a second. "So's—basically I don't actually know, y'know I mean if it quit in th'middle of a fight an' got me killed I ain't gonna remember none, coulda been doin' this since we got here, see."

Dell saw. The observation was more than he expected out of the boy in general. "Right," he said, inspecting the mechanisms. "Receiver looks fine. The action too. Heck, I don't see nothin' wrong with it. You got your ammo?"

"Way ahead'a you," Scout said, already rolling a pair of shells between his fingers. As Dell took them out of his hand, Scout nudged his messenger bag with a foot, half-stowed under the sawhorses they were using as seats. "I got a bunch, I mean it worked fine this mornin', it don't quit all the time. Hey I bet youse can't hit that bottle off that beam, heck, how'd that even get up there? You think Demo's—"

Dell dropped his goggles back down over his eyes and pulled the trigger. The gun boomed into the quiet of the evening, busting a haybale two yards away into half its original size. Another squeeze of the trigger and it was smithereens, and so were the next two he aimed for. Dell hummed low in his throat when he ran out of shots, then squatted down to pull more shells from Scout's bag.

The next few minutes were nothing but the bang of Scout's gun as Dell tried to replicate the misfire. When he stopped to reload the thing for the third time, Scout said, "Hey so what's your deal been lately anyway?"

The shells popped into the barrel with a satisfying click. "My deal," Dell repeated, closing the gun.

"Yeah, your deal," Scout said. "Damn, man, I mean you ain't exactly been a friggin' ray of Texas sunshine, not since we got here."

"If this is about the thing with the teleporter again, that was on Soldier."

A breath of disbeliving laughter left Scout's lips. "Hey, you about made Soldier eat his own helmet cuz he tried to get the spy for ya, I mean it's _Soldier_, he's a box'a rocks anyway, ain't seen you so mad since Spy sapped your sentry on accident."

"He ought to know better than to mess with my machines," said Dell, and he fired off another round into a half-decimated haybale. "Both of 'em. That teleporter needin' to be workin' and Soldier went and jammed his shovel inside it. And I don't even want to know where he got the raccoon. Four years that spy ain't never disguised himself as a machine and Soldier goes and decides that's what he's done anyway." Another thunder of shotgun shells. "Him standing at the exit waitin' to bash people in the head with that damn shovel of his ain't efficient spycheckin', either. I got Pyro for that."

"Oh yeah cuz he's real reliable," Scout snorted. "Youse been bitin' his head off too even. In the lockers the other day? With the tie? I thought you was gonna strangle 'im with it, never figgered I'd see the day, you frickin' baby the guy."

"Lay off Pyro."

The sneer in Scout's voice cracked the cold air. "_'Lay off Pyro'_, sheesh, s'like you're married to the freak. The hell'd he'd ever do for you even, seems like you get pissy with him more than you do nothin' else no more."

Outside, the wind began to howl.

Dell cracked open the weapon again, checked it, then shut it. "Ain't a blame thing wrong with your gun," he said, tossing it back to his teammate. "Try reloadin' it next time."

"Hey—!"

"Goodnight, Scout."

An empty field of white awaited him when he reached the barn door. He paused in the threshold and took a moment to damn the snow and whoever came up with the stuff. "Hey!" Scout repeated from behind him. Dell ignored him, which meant Scout kept going. "You don't gotta take everything so personal, y'know. Shit, used to be wasn't nothin' ruffled you. The hell happened?"

Dell's headache roared back into focus. "I said goodnight," he answered, and disappeared into the cold.


	2. Burnout

**02. burn·out _|ˈbərnˌout|_**

1. the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion.  
2. physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.

* * *

Dell awoke a full hour before he would have liked, his face too hot beneath a stray beam of sunlight. That made it about the same as every other day since he arrived. Coldfront's base had the blessing of individual rooms instead of barracks, exactly nine of them, but his had a window that faced east and a bed against the west wall. Even though the first thing he'd done was fix a spare blanket up as a makeshift curtain, the damn sun—and the cold—still seemed to slip through to jar him awake most mornings. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

By the time he pulled himself out from the covers his alarm was about to go off anyway. He pulled on his clothes, thanked heaven it was Saturday, and went to scavenge for food.

The mess was empty, but the fridge, unexpectedly, was filled with pancakes. Every single one of them was burned around the edges, and one looked more like a tire than a pancake, but it was all mostly edible. He stacked his plate with the least-black specimens and high-tailed it out of there: the mess was the coldest part of the base.

He made his way to the common room, and found Sniper, basking in a pool of winter-bright sunlight like a rangy cat. His hands moved in quick, neat fashion, and something soft and green spilled down from them to pool in his lap. Knitting, again. No one had realized Sniper could knit until they'd been hauled up here into the cold, and the scarves and hats started piling up. He didn't lift his eyes from his work when Dell walked in, but he did say, "G'mornin', truckie."

"Mornin'." Dell settled into the vast stuffed armchair he had claimed as his own and started picking at his food. "Didn't snow again, did it?"

Sniper chuckled, and started a new row in his knitting. "Didn't stop."

"Damn it all. Don't know how you stand it." Even here Dell could feel the sharp prickling of his skin, irritated by the cool air. "I'm hardly dealin' with it myself, and it's even hotter where you come from, ain't it?"

"Hotter than Texas? Might be. In the bush, sure, in the wet season. Oh, mail for you," Sniper said, leaning sideways in his chair to nab something out of the windowsill. "Yesterday," he added when he stretched out an arm to hand Dell an envelope. "Y'seemed a bit out of sorts after dinner, though, thought it best not to bother you."

The letter, a faint shade of robin's-egg and stamped with BLU's logo, was cold to the touch. "Thanks," Dell said, wiping off his knife to open the seal. He knew what it was before he even unfolded it, but something possessed him to scan through the thin typewritten letters beneath the REGARDING YOUR FUNDING REQUEST headline again anyway. When he looked up he found Sniper eyeing him. "Well?"

"Denied," Dell said, dropping the paper by his feet. "Same old. Don't know how I'm s'posed to get anything workin' in this fool weather without the right tools."

"What's it you're lookin' to get fundin' for, again? Seems you been gettin' denied a lot, didn't they shoot you down for a fourth-level sentry back in Steel, too?"

Dell nodded. "Yeah. An', the teleporters don't work right in the snow. An' I mean why should they, s'Aussie tech, ain't got no need for it to work in the snow down under." Dell looked at his food and set it down, too. Suddenly he wasn't hungry.

"Huh. You're right on that one. S'a matter with 'em? Seems they work fine to me."

"Eh, technicalities. It'd bore ya."

Sniper nodded, and let it go.

* * *

If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn't say the teleporters needed fixing. More or less they worked fine. He had sorted out some time ago that the minor glitches the extreme cold caused in them—transmission lag, blips in frag detection, and the like—they were problems, but problems of a sort that could be solved in a few hours' time with the right hardware. And the hardware wasn't that hard to get ahold of, really.

Maybe BLU knew he was lying about what he needed the money for.

It was drawing on near late afternoon, now. Dell had filled his time with re-reading the handful of magazines lying around the base, and trying to sort out why Sniper's van had been stalling. Didn't know why the man had brought the damn thing all the way up here, and engineering was pretty far off from auto repair no matter what Sniper thought, but here he was trying to fix it regardless. The van was the only mode of transport they had off the base, and anyway, it didn't sit well with Dell to have no escape route.

The engine just revved and died when he turned it on. The second time it belched enough black smoke from the tailpipe to fog the room for a moment. After an hour he'd gotten it to where it would rumble to life for a few seconds before quitting. By then his fingers were going blue, and the wind was sneaking into the garage where the van was housed, biting into him.

He had just decided he wasn't going to get anything more done on the van that day when a door banged shut behind him. He looked, and found the Pyro standing on the cement steps. In one gloved hand she held a rusting metal bird cage, filled with dead grass and defrosting hay. Dell shut the van's hood and looked at her. "Where'd you get that?"

The Pyro just waved at him. She crossed the garage, to the old shelves covered in abandoned things, and started rummaging through the rusting coffee cans and plastic bins, humming to herself. Dell kept half an eye on her as he stowed his tools. He was just dropping the last of them into the toolbox when a muffled cry of triumph echoed from the shelves.

Dell looked up in time to see the Pyro sit down on the ground to push a tennis ball into the cage, on top of the "nest." Then she shut the little wire door, and when she noticed him watching she leapt up and ran toward him. He braced himself for another shattering hug, but she just skidded to a stop before him and held up her new toy, glowing with pride. "Lhuk!"

"I see it," Dell said, not looking. Then he turned away to pack up his toolbox and hefted it over his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go inside. Too cold."

She followed him back into the base, and all the way back to his workshop. Night was coming on, now, early as ever with it being January. Dell unlocked his workshop door and flipped on the light. Their familiar hum greeted him as the workshop was bathed in yellow.

He glanced over his shoulder at his teammate again. She was hanging back, trying to draw shapes in the fog on the windows with her finger. "Pyro, hey." She ignored him. "Pyro!"

The Pyro looked up and tilted her head to one side. A renewed sense of exhaustion crashed into him. Of all the damn things she could have kept as a part of her, out of every bizarre habit, she'd kept that damn head-tilt. He pushed the weariness down and headed back into the workshop, and the Pyro trotted in after him.

"Sit," he told her, and she hopped onto one of the two-dozen crates stuffed in the corner of the workshop. Dell brushed past her to the workshop's storage room, and after a moment's rifling through it pulled out a squat, silver box, all bare wires and exposed circuits. Gold and green vials of liquid sloshed in their tubes as he set it down next to the Pyro. She watched as he went to haul a dispenser from across the room and dropped it beside her, fiddling with the bars on her bird cage. When she reached for the glass tubes and their sparkling contents he slapped her hand away, and she whined. "You'll hurt yourself," he scolded her, leaning over to the workshop's smaller bench to pull out a ragged cardboard box bursting with color. "An' last time you got the stuff all over these, remember?"

The Pyro made a muted noise of delight when she saw it, reaching for it even before he put it down next to her. In her haste to pull out one of the dozen-some childrens's books from the pile, she let the bird cage and its tennis ball egg slip from her lap. It clattered to the ground with a grating clang.

With the Pyro occupied Dell went through the motions of cracking open the dispenser to hook it up to the silver contraption. By now he didn't have to think about it: disconnect the proximity sensor, ground the inductive ballast, check the monitoring graph. He had it put together in under two minutes. When he was done, the silver box lay on top of the dispenser, feeding a handful of hoses and pipes down into its guts. He thumbed the power button, and got the hell out of the way.

The dispenser hummed and something in it thumped. The all-familiar light of medigun beam began to edge out of it to twine around the Pyro, glowing gold instead of blue. She didn't seem to notice. They had done this too many times for her to stay interested.

From a safe distance from the dispenser's reaching beams, Dell watched, wondering what in hell he was putting in her system this time. Nothing he'd tried out of the dozens of vials secreted from Medic's hoards had done anything like what he wanted them to do—Medic labeled things in a typical doctor's scrawl, and in German. Some of them did nothing at all. Some had left him gritting his teeth and wondering why in hell the doctor even had it laying around. Over the years Dell had accidentally inflicted the Pyro with more pain than he cared to remember.

It was harder, back in the beginning. The first time he'd poisoned her he realized his mistake too late. When he'd gotten her off the bad dispenser and pulled her to a clean one her lungs had already filled with fluid, and blood leaked from her nose and ears. Pink foam frothed up out of her throat at terrifying speeds, staining the floor and his overalls. Then she died with a pathetic noise, went limp in seconds. It all happened so quickly.

He stopped using third-level dispensers after that. He stopped getting so close to her, too—the stain had never come out of his clothes, and in the end he'd thrown that particular pair away. Sometimes she reached for him. Sometimes he tied her down when there was no weapon in easy reach. For a while he'd used Medic's anaesthetics in conjunction with whatever new thing he'd swiped. That had worked well enough, until one day he looked at her and realized he'd dosed her with something acid. It had eaten holes in her suit and skin and she still sat there quietly, unaware of what was happening to her.

Dell had come to prefer the shotgun.

If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn't say he still had hope of restoring the Pyro to the person he had found trying to set his house on fire, the arsonist with the firestorm temper, unexpectedly clever, with her one-eyed gas mask and her beautiful handcrafted flamethrower. That woman was dead. He didn't know why he kept trying.

But, he reasoned, if he quit trying, he'd be giving up. And damned if Dell Conagher would give up.

The Pyro, oblivious and happy, turned another page.

* * *

Dell left her like that, went about his business. The Pyro would pour over those books endlessly, even if she couldn't read them anymore. It was just as well, since from everything he'd learned about that first broken dispenser, it took hours for the mind-altering chemicals to go into effect. The Pyro had been exposed to the first one for something like eighteen hours altogether, as far as he could figure, and that was enough to turn a smart if unstable woman into a child-minded monster.

On the other side of the workshop, the dispenser hummed, and the Pyro talked quietly to herself in muffled words he was grateful he couldn't understand. For a time he banged about the workbench, cleaning up after five-AM brainstorming sessions, kicking boxes of spare parts and spare shotguns out of the way. It was amazing how many shotguns seemed to accumulate around the team, and somehow they always found their way into his workshops.

He had just cleared the second workbench of its mysterious mountains of refuse when he felt a tug on his shirt sleeve. "What?"

"Strhy." Dell glanced over his shoulder at her, found himself lens to lens with that rubber mask that served as a face. The Pyro let go of his sleeve and gestured to the book in her hand. "Hhlees?"

"No. G'wan, sit back down."

"Munn't hhna."

Dell sighed. "If I tell you a story, then you got to sit back down, okay? And a short one. I got things to be doin'."

She clapped her hands, once, then darted back to her seat on the crate. As Dell leaned back against the workbench, she stooped to grab the birdcage up from the floor. After a moment, she fished out the tennis ball from inside, pulled out a lighter from her ammo pouch, and began trying to set the bright green fuzz aflame. He didn't bother stopping her.

Instead he folded his arms over his chest, looking heavenward, as if that would do him any good. "So … once 'pon a time there was this … cat, and the cat—"

"Nho!" Dell glanced at her, brows knitting. "Hh mrrd. Hh mrrd hnn." _The bird one._

"I said I ain't tellin' you that one no more."

"Hh mrrd!" Her hands curled into fists and she raised them up by her face in a show of pleading. "Hhlees, hhlees, hh mrrd hnn, hh—"

He put up a hand. "Fine. Fine, just, don't ask me again. Okay?" He got a vigorous nod in answer. The Pyro leaned forward, waiting.

Dell rubbed his nose and scratched his neck, stalling. Of all the idiot things he'd done since she'd gone and destroyed herself, the bird story was one of the worst. "So … once there was a bird. A phoenix bird, you remember what a phoenix is?" Head tilt. "C'mon, told you this a dozen times, girl. It's this bird that can set itself on fire, more or less, but only when—only when it's ready t'die. Real unusual creature." He glanced aside. "Now, this phoenix, she had herself a problem. She couldn't turn her fire off."

Outside, it had begun to snow again. Dell's eyes cut to the broad flakes tumbling down to smother them. He must have been silent for longer than he realized, because suddenly the Pyro was making impatient noises, fidgeting. The tennis ball was crisped to black and the acrid smell of burnt rubber hung in the air. "Hnnd?"

"… couldn't turn it off," he repeated, shifting his weight from one leg to the next. "So wherever she flew she set big blazes. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Phoenixes, they love fire, same as you. But it weren't good, all the fires she was settin'. They were outta control. She burned up the whole countryside, caused a real mess, hurt—hurt some people. Until all the other critters—the unicorns an' the griffins, even the dragons—they rounded up and drove her out to the desert, where she could have all the fire she liked without hurtin' nobody.

"But out there in the desert, she wasn't happy. She burned and burned and burned everything, trying to be happy, 'til all the cactuses were black skeletons an' there weren't no living thing'd come near her. And finally one day she looked around and realized she'd burned up everything, everything except herself." He hated this story, he hated he'd ever told her this damn story at all, what was the good of any of it? "So she did what every phoenix does, she went and burned so bright and so hot her own fire ate her up."

The Pyro watched him with rapt attention, almost completely still. The dispenser's hum seemed louder without her fussing, with the silence that consumed the world outside. When he paused for breath he could hear the lights buzzing, the Pyro's filtered breathing, but those was the only other sounds.

Dell drew a deep breath. "And when she did, as the smoke went an' carried her in the air, she found herself her family, since phoenixes, they get reborn when they die, that's what the flames're for." He looked up, and for a long moment matched the gaze of the empty black lenses. "An' the phoenix, she got what she wanted, whatever it was. She was happy."

The Pyro was quiet a time. She was turning the torched tennis ball over in her heavy gloves, squishing and warping the weakened plastic. "Whht hbt—" she started to say, when the ball cracked open in her hands with a pop. She stared down at it, startled. Dell glanced at it, too.

There was a tiny, pink-skinned thing, beaked and clawed, lying motionless in one half of the false egg.

Dell stared at it for a full ten seconds before he took a long, steadying breath. He rubbed both eyes and looked again, sparkles bursting along the edges of his vision.

It was gone.

His shoulders sagged. He glanced at the dispenser, still pumping its mystery chemicals into the Pyro's brain and bloodstream, and turned away.

* * *

"How many times must I tell you? Nothing. There is nothing to be done."

The infirmary was spotless, though it smelled like blood and chloroform. Coldfront's medical room reminded him of the premed wing at his second college, if you darkened all the lights and hung questionable posters on the walls. Medic seemed to have no end of questionable posters. This station's theme of choice was mildewed advertisements from students seeking cadaver donations.

From where he was leaning against a steel table, empty of things that might jab him if he looked at them funny, Dell glared at Medic from beneath his goggles. His teammate ignored his stare, looking exceptionally bored as he flitted from surgical tool from deranged-looking surgical tool like one of his doves. "It ain't about Pyro," Dell said, "it's about me."

Medic lifted one eyebrow, but his attention was still zeroed in on the delicate silver tools. "Ahh, have you changed your mind?"

"What?"

"About my new procedure," Medic said, whirling suddenly enough that his coat flew out and dragged half of the newly-sanitized tools to the floor. He didn't even blink, too busy fixing Dell with a bright-eyed stare. "The one with the bugs, come now, I detailed this to you at great length!"

Oh. Lord, that, right. Dell recalled it now, a starless and chilly night at Hydro with Medic explaining—at great length, indeed—how integrating themselves with insectoid traits would vastly heighten their field advantage. The reasons behind it had been flimsier than cardboard, and he wasn't fooling anyone except maybe Scout, anyhow. It wasn't like Medic actually cared if they won or lost any of their rounds. "No," Dell said, "no, and hell no. The problem is I'm seein' things."

"Oh," Medic said. Everything about him, from his voice to his posture, dulled in an instant. "So it _is_ about Pyro."

"It's about the dispenser that you poisoned, and I'd damn well appreciate it if you took some responsibility."

"I was advancing the cause of psychological medicine."

Dell stared at him for a long few seconds, felt his temper fraying strand by strand. "You know what, I don't care what you thought you were doin'. I am seein' things an' this all rests on you. Fix it."

"I can't. I have said this!" Medic said, kneeling now to scoop up his instruments. "All the samples are gone, my notes were lost when the RED pyro burned Barnblitz, you destroyed the prototype in a fit of drunkenness." He peered over his shoulder at Dell, squinting through his pince-nez. "So, no. I don't even remember what I put in the original. And on the subject, Engineer—I would appreciate it if you would stop stealing my dispenser compounds."

"Steal—?" Dell bit his tongue, leaning back. "…I ain't done no such thing."

In answer he got a long-suffering sigh and a clatter as Medic dumped the tools unceremoniously onto the table. "Lies do not suit you, my friend." He didn't even do Dell the dignity of looking at him as he said it, set right back into organizing the scissors and scalpels. "Anyway everything you have taken has either been a disease or a poison. I do not believe this was your intent, poisoning Herr Pyro."

"I don't got a clue what you're talkin' about. You keep poison 'round here?"

"Yes," Medic said, absently picking a feather off of something long and silver and painful-looking. "I've been wanting Spy to swap them into RED's dispensers, but he's being dreadfully stubborn about it. I think the last one you took was my tetrodotoxin."

"And that is fancy German doctor for what?"

"Greek, actually," said Medic. "Are you familiar with blowfish poisoning?"

* * *

Dell keyed in the security code and threw open the door to his workshop in time to see the Pyro staring quizzically at the ground. He barely registered the book splayed on the cement floor, or stiff, arrhythmic way her fingers moved as she tried to reach for it. Instead he grabbed her by the shoulder-strap and jerked her away from the dispenser. He ignored it when she stumbled and hit the ground.

The dispenser made a flat, jarring crunch when he hit the power button. Even with it off Dell backed well out of its range, and for a second just stared at it, breathing hard. Hadn't known he could make it from one side of the base to the other quite that fast.

A weak grunt drew his attention away. The Pyro was still laid out on the ground right by his feet, awkwardly gathering her hands and knees beneath her. He stepped away, watching as she tried to get up.

All her movements were slow and jerky, like a rusty wind-up toy. She reached out a hand to steady herself against the workbench and came crashing down on her shoulder instead. She just lay there, then. When she started to move again, still disoriented and hunched up with pain, Dell took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

When he opened them again, the Pyro had managed to pull herself up to a sitting position. She was pawing frantically at her mask, fingers too stiff to grip right. Dell just watched, tired, as she slowly pulled the thing off.

The mask hit the ground and the Pyro gasped in air, slumping back against the big workbench. He could see her chest heaving, the way her mouth hung open and her tongue lolled. In college he'd had a friend majoring in marine biology, chatty girl. He'd got an earful on every kind of dangerous fish you could care to mention and promptly forgotten about all of them until just now. He didn't remember much of what she'd said about blowfish, not until Medic began lecturing him on it. Then the memories started to trickle in.

"…_paralysis of the diaphragm, suffocating to death while fully conscious…"_

Before he realized it he was tearing across the base quick as he dared.

The Pyro looked a mess, as she always did. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, a nest of grease and tangles. Sweat beaded her face and collected in the corners of the burn scar that streaked down one side of her face, and her eyes didn't quite focus. They hadn't in years. Now strings of saliva spilled out the edges of her mouth. Dell averted his eyes as she lurched sideways and vomited.

He cussed a blue streak all the way to his storage closet, louder and nastier when the Pyro started whimpering. He grabbed the first shotgun he saw, shoved the rounds in, sent the picture book and forgotten bird cage spinning when he stormed past them on his way back to her. The bird cage went rattling off beneath his second workbench, and the book thumped into the Pyro's leg. She looked down at it, stupefied.

The safety came off with a click, and strangely that was enough to draw the Pyro's attention. She dragged her gaze upward and stopped on the barrel of the shotgun, pointed at her head. Then she looked up at him. Her pupils were mismatched pinpoints of black.

Dell stared back at her. His finger curled around the trigger. "C'mon," he hissed, "quit lookin' at me like that." She blinked at his voice, face screwed up in pain, but didn't look away. "Dammit, Pyro, close your damn eyes. It's for your own good."

"Okay," she mumbled, and then her eyes fell shut. Dell wet his lips, felt the cool of the gun against his fingers. His hands were steady as he pushed the muzzle up against her forehead, right on the edge of her scar.

"Shouldn't trust me like that, girl," he said, and pulled the trigger.


	3. Antisocial Behavior

**03. an·ti·so·cial be·hav·ior ****_|ˌantēˈsō sh əl biˈhāvyər|_**

1. behavior that lacks consideration for others and may cause damage to the society, whether intentionally or through negligence.

* * *

Monday was every bit as cold and harrowing as the days before it. Dell leaned against the cold metal of his sentry, huddled in a thin coat, face burrowed into one of Sniper's gift scarves. The one Dell got had been a bright patch in this whole ordeal, anyway: it was a remarkable thing, his familiar Texas landscape worked out in yarn. A cloudless blue sky unfurled over its length, mirrored with flat expanses of yellow grasses, with birds and little cow skulls and cacti breaking up the foreground. It was as comforting as it was warm.

From his nest up on the cliff outside the RED base, Dell waited. The match had gone turtle, and he had been sitting here for thirty minutes, listening to the sounds of fighting inside the base. It wasn't unusual at all, really, sitting and waiting—holding territory—was part of his job. Wouldn't have been a problem but for the damn cold. It was burrowing in through his clothes, relentless. Frostbite would probably kick in any time.

Dell sighed fog into the air and checked his gun again—loaded, safety off, just as it had been when he'd looked at it a minute ago, and the minute before that, and before that. It was like that old saying about the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. He had just shut the magazine when he saw motion down below.

The Pyro—and Scout. Dell watched the two of them slink around the sliding door on the far side of the base, circling around under the chain-link fence where the RED demoman had nearly done him in. From here he could just see blood splattering Scout's clothes, and more on the Pyro's suit. Her flamethrower was missing, and instead she dragged her axe through the trampled snow behind them, leaving a crimson trail.

They reached the other end of the base, the garage with the ramp. Must've been going to try and flank. Before they could get there, though, the RED heavy burst out through the side door.

Even from here the roar of the minigun as it spun up made Dell flinch. Caught in the open, both his teammates froze for a split-second. Then the heavy boomed an eager laugh and opened fire.

The RED was out of the sentry's range. There was nothing Dell could do, and he knew better than to go one-to-one with the enemy heavy anyway. Had ever since the man had crammed Dell's own wrench into his throat. All he could do was watch.

The Pyro moved first, turning on her heel to run for cover. Crazy or not, she had sense enough for that. Scout acted a split-second later. Quicker on his feet, he caught up with her in a stride and a half and shoved past her to get away, hard enough to knock her to the ground. He didn't look back to see her reaching for him.

In a few seconds more she was turning the snow around her red, her suit riddled with bullet holes. The heavy shouted in triumph, and set off past her body to where Scout had gone.

The bright trail the Pyro had dragged with her axe behind her made it look like she had crawled through the snow, bleeding. Dell didn't look at her long. The way she had fallen was eerily like the way she had two days ago, when he'd blown her brains out across his workbench. She'd dropped sideways then, hit the cement with an unpleasant, wet smack. The buckshot had obliterated most of her skull, and blood poured out over the floor.

The remains made an unpleasant squelch when he nudged them with his boot. Then he laid the shotgun down on the bench, wiping his hands off on his overalls even though they were clean. He removed the tetrodotoxin from the dispenser, and then sat there on the crates for twenty minutes, weighing the pros and cons of going back to Medic and jamming it down his gullet.

In the end he didn't. Of course he didn't. Instead he stowed the glass vial back in the storage closet, deep in a corner, too high and too far back to be anywhere anyone might see it. By then the Pyro's body was gone, and with it all traces of what had happened, except for some buckshot embedded in the workbench. She came back ten minutes later, looking for her bird cage, and seemed confused when she found the tennis ball scorched and cracked in half.

"Mmd hht hhtchh?"

"Yeah, it hatched," Dell told her from where he stood detaching the vial tester from the dispenser. He was elbow-deep in the thing, wrestling a screw that wouldn't come off.

The Pyro looked around. "Mmrh hhs hht?"

"Flew away."

"Hhut mmrh—"

Dell twisted the wrench too hard. The screw stripped or something, twisted in its socket but didn't come out, and he scraped the heel of his hand bloody along the machinery inside the dispenser. He dropped the wrench and swore. The one time he hadn't bothered with his gloves. "Dammit, Pyro, I don't know. South for the winter, the Galapagos Islands. Okay? I don't know. Damn it all." Gingerly he extracted himself from the machine and examined his hand. A jagged flap of skin spilled down over his wrist, the muscle exposed and crimson. It wasn't nice to look at, and it hurt like hell, but it was nothing one of his field dispensers couldn't fix.

The Pyro was silent as he set up one of the field models. He'd gotten good at setting up his war machines one-handed after four years, had plenty of practice staving off the RED scout and pyro with his pistol while he pulled a sentry into position. Before long the dispenser, a proper one, one he knew for fact did not contain any kind of poison, was humming over his wounded hand. Sometimes he wondered if he might not be better chopping the thing off.

His thoughts were interrupted by a muffled, "Srrhy." He looked up to find the Pyro watching him from the middle of the workshop, near where he had put her down. She leaned back on her heels, hands knit together in front of her stomach with her head low and her spine slouched. "Srrhy, Hhenghy."

The dispenser knit his skin together, eased the pain from his nervous system. Dell loosened his shoulders, leaning against the dispenser. He regarded her a second or two, sighed, and gestured her closer. "It's okay. Nothin' permanent."

She didn't move. Dell sucked on his lip, then looked down around at the floor. "Look, here," he said, kneeling to pick up the fallen book he had kicked aside earlier. He extended it to her, an olive branch. "G'wan, go find Heavy or Demo, see if they'll read you that. You're fine. Okay?"

That worked. She hesitated only another moment, then trotted toward him to take the book. When she took it, she tucked it under her arm, and then took his uninjured hand in both of hers. She just held it for a few seconds, looking at him. Just looking. The pressure of her fingers hurt.

She let go, and left.

Dell blinked. The corpse in the snow was gone, and with it the blood. A wind was picking up. He grit his teeth and pushed his back up against the rock wall behind him. He checked his gun again. When a voice to his left said, "привет, Engineer!" he nearly jammed his fingers in the shotgun's pump.

"Dammit, Heavy," he breathed as Heavy climbed the snowy path up to his perch. "Told you you got to stop sneakin' up on me like that."

A low boom of laughter answered him. "Sorry," Heavy said, "I am practicing to replace Spy. _Oui?_"

That wrestled a smirk out of Dell. "Stab 'em with those bear claws'a yours, right? They won't ever see it coming."

Heavy nodded, setting his minigun down without more than a light crunch in the snow by the nest's dispenser. "This—is three?"

"Yeah, got it all kitted out, don't need for nothin' right now. Help yourself."

Heavy nodded again, rifling through the dispenser's drawers for bullets. Dell rubbed his hands together and wished his ears would warm up. "How's it goin' out there?"

"Bloody," Heavy said. "It is a good fight. Seven times I have killed little RED scout, once with bare hands, and still he charges Heavy like tiny bull." He fixed Dell with a knowing look, a smile unfurling on his face. "And their engineer. He is joke, today he uses the baby sentries. I crush them, like this!" he said, illustrating with his massive hands. "Is a good fight, today. Doktor is building his über now, and soon we will crush them back, take point."

"Good," said Dell, "Great. Maybe we can wrap this thing up in another few days and get outta this goddamn cold."

He could hear the bitterness in his own voice. It seemed amplified by the cold air, like it was freezing his words, trapping and preserving them in ice. Heavy slotted the last few rounds of bullets into his Sasha and closed the gun. "Still this is too cold for you? This is warm winter, in Russia."

"I ain't from Russia," Dell said. "You know what I'm used to, Texas is hot as New Mexico. Hotter, some days. I ain't got a clue how you're dealin' with this cold."

"Fur," Heavy said, "and good vodka."

"Yeah?" Dell snorted, kicking snow off his boots. "I'll have to try that."

"I have question."

"Shoot."

"It is what you said to Pyro."

Dell slowed. "Sorry?"

Heavy gestured toward the RED base. "Before weekend. Outside, here. I heard sentry, came to see where you had gone. Instead, I find Pyro and angry Engineer." He gave pause, and Dell could feel his gaze upon him. Had he really raised his voice that much? "Is strange thing to say to your friend, that they are not a person."

"…Spose so." Dell turned his attention back to his sentry. "Don't know if I'd call 'em a friend anymore, really."

"No? I have wondered why you are friends with him. He is strange." Heavy dropped his voice, frowning. "I do not like him very much."

"You ain't tellin' me you're scared of Pyro, are ya?"

Dell was met with a long silence. Heavy brushed new snow from the top of the dispenser. "He is—something is wrong with him. He acts like little child, then on the battlefield he is like demon. Asks me to read him stories, like my smallest sister when she is baby, ehh…"

"Demon—c'mon, Heavy, it's just Pyro. They just—they got a different drum." Heavy looked at him quizzically. "Like, like 'beat of a different'—never mind. Point is Pyro ain't a demon, they're just ... they like their job. You like your job, we all do, none of us'd be here otherwise."

Heavy's face had taken a turn for the ponderous. He had opened his mouth again when a familiar figure crested the slope leading up to his nest. The Pyro paused before them and waved, a little, before hefting her flamethrower and slouching against the dispenser. Dell watched her as Heavy finished feeding the loop of bullets into his gun. "Well," Heavy said, hefting his minigun up, "I am needed in fighting. Sorry for so many of questions, Engineer."

Dell barely heard him. He was watching the Pyro, eyes narrowed beneath his goggles. She looked at him, and then Heavy. In one smooth motion she slung the long neck of her flame thrower over her shoulder and gestured to the RED base, saying something Dell couldn't make out under the mask.

As the wind whistled past his head he leveled the shotgun with the Pyro's face and pulled the trigger.

The report was no less loud for the snow, and Dell cocked the gun again to be safe as her body crumpled to the ground. By the time it hit the snow, though, the blue rubber was gone, replaced with a red pinstripe suit.

Beside him he could feel Heavy's surprised silence. "He don't ever learn," Dell said, leaning the gun up against the cliff face and taking out his wrench again.

"How did you know?"

How did he know? What was he supposed to say? That the real Pyro would never act that natural, not anymore? That the RED spy had never scrambled up on top of a sentry when Dell's back was turned to pretend to drive it? That he could never get the unpredictable sway of her walk right? That Dell had the Pyro's nervous habits and the cadence of her movements down by heart?

That it was better safe than sorry?

"Lucky guess," Dell said.

The sounds of battle grew louder, and the fighting suddenly spilled out of the RED base. Dell saw Medic tearing out first, missing his medipack and part of an arm. Behind him came Soldier and Demo, legging it toward mid. "Doktor!" shouted Heavy as the REDs came spilling out of their base. "Up here!"

While Soldier and Demoman bore left between the cliffs, Medic wheeled sideways, toward Heavy and Dell's nest. When he passed Heavy on the slope, the gunman planted his feet, opening fire on the throng of REDs charging up the hill. Dell had just finished packing up his dispenser when Medic got to him. "What are you doing?!"

"Movin' this," Dell said, hefting the compacted dispenser in his arms. Beside them his sentry beeped and locked its sights on the RED pyro, spitting bullets. "This'n's a level three, I ain't leavin' it to get wrecked."

"I am _missing an arm_, put it back—"

"Quitcher bitchin', will ya?" Dell snapped, heading down the little path that lead back toward mid. "There's a damn medkit right over here."

Medic followed him in a deathly silence, until they reached the little cliff that dropped off into the middle territory. While Dell slid down easily enough, Medic stood clutching his stump and glaring. "Help me down."

"You don't need my help."

Medic spat something in German, and Dell figured his lineage had just been insulted. "It is hardly my fault you took poison when you wanted panacea! Are you a professional or a child? _Help me down_."

Dell got his dispenser settled down and building itself in the little nook behind the cliff. Then he shot a glare up at Medic, stepped up onto the slowly-rising machine, and offered his hand. "_Thank_ you," Medic said.

By the time the BLU team was pushed back to mid, Dell had a basic sentry put together. The Medic was still hunched in a ball by the dispenser—his arm had grown right back, like a lizard, though just now it still looked weak and jaundiced. Dell glanced at him as he came back with more metal for his sentry. "Where's yer gear? Gonna need that medpack."

"The spy stabbed it. Useless now. Next time I will booby-trap it for him." Medic scowled and peered around the corner, where the BLU and RED scouts were shit-talking each other and feinting rushes. "I must get back to the base."

"Don't let me stop ya."

"You are extraordinarily unhelpful today."

Dell ignored him. He shoved more ammo into the sentry and set about pulling it into its second level. He'd nearly gotten it when Medic got to his feet and raised his uninjured hand. "Pyro!"

Dell looked up in time to see the Pyro trot up to the nest, whole and uninjured. The pilot light on her flamethrower burned bright in the failing afternoon light. "Hhy Hhenghy. Hhy Mmdhk."

"Come, I have a job for you. I must get back to the base—"

"Be a lot more efficient to just shoot you, doc."

Medic paused in his explanation, peering over his glasses at Dell. Dell pretended not to notice. "I hardly think respawn is what is called for here."

"If you're running off with Pyro back to base that leaves me with no Pyro to spycheck me, an' in case you hadn't noticed we're kinda on the defensive now," Dell said, even-toned. His eyes never left the sentry, now a complete level two. "Which means I got to be keepin' an eye on every fool patch of empty air 'round my machines, which means I waste time I could be usin' on upgrades. Now, if I just shot ya," he continued, "then you'd get back here round about the same time it'd take you to get here if you walked there and back, and I'd still have Pyro on hand. Real easy. Simple."

Medic sighed. "Pragmatism! As always, yes. You are right, of course, but—I am declining anyway. I am certain you can fend for yourself. Pyro, come."

The Pyro fell into step behind Medic without so much as a question. Both of them stopped midstep at the sound of a cocking shotgun. "Pyro, get outta the way," Dell said.

She did as she was told, wheeling around to look at him in obvious confusion. Medic did not turn around. "Engineer," he said after a moment. "I believe I have already told you my feelings on this matter."

"You sure did."

"If you feel this strongly on the subject, then keep Pyro. I will return to the base on my own."

"It ain't about Pyro."

Around them, the wind began to howl.

"Well, then," Medic said, and he sounded amused. He spread his arms out, his back a vast white target without the familiar medpack. "If this will settle your silly grudge. By all means."

Dell glared down the sights of his shotgun at the doctor for what felt like a long time, the sounds of fighting fading from his ears. In the corner of his eye he could see the Pyro looking back and forth between them, like she wasn't sure what was happening. Of course she wasn't.

"I am waiting," Medic said. "If you are going to do it, do it."

Everything was calm and quiet and he was going shoot his own teammate. Dell curled his finger around the trigger.

"_Doktor!_"

The bellow was distant and faint, torn by the wind, but that didn't keep Dell from almost dropping the gun. His head whipped around and he saw Heavy in the distance, back pressed up against one of the half-rotted fences on the other side of the battleground. Flares and pipe-bombs flew around and past him, and he wasn't looking toward them. "_Doktor! I need you!"_

Medic said, "Well?"

Something in Dell's chest buckled. "…Get outta here," he said. "Get. Pyro, go with 'im."

"Hhwht—"

"I said _get_!"

The Pyro got.

Dell stared after them long after they disappeared into the snow.


End file.
